This 1977 Ford LTD sat for sale for well over eighteen months at a used car lot not far from my home here in Cleveland. Sitting as long as it did, it became a landmark of sorts and the longer it remained unsold the more assured I was in my drive by assessment of it that no one would ever buy it.
Well, never say never. It disappeared shortly before the lot closed. I wonder if someone actually bought it or if it went to auction and was sold to another of these little lots that dot the landscape here in northeast Ohio and northwest Pennsylvania. They do say there's an ass for ever seat but Big Red here was a tough putt - like a super needy, sickly but sweet old dog in a need of a forever home, the odds were stacked against it despite it being in great shape and with a reasonable asking price of around four thousand dollars. There's an enthusiast market for two door sedans and station wagons but four door sedans? Nada.
Man, these cars were big and standing next to it the anxiety came back to me that I felt as a young, inexperienced driver behind the wheel of a big car. While the John Wayne in me would never let on how scared I was, trust me, I was freaked the hell out. Back in the 1970's, it wasn't as if people didn't know that cars were too big either. Going back to the '40's, American cars were derided for their sheer mass but Detroit kept making them incrementally bigger and bigger. Things really got out of hand, though, in the 1970's. Iron like Big Red were not only bigger than ever, on the cusp of the great downsizing epoch that was spear headed by GM starting in 1977. they were biggest they'd ever be. What is it they say about it being darkest before dawn?
It wasn't so much the length of these cars I found so intimidating - it was their width. At give or take eighty inches wide, that's nearly eight feet, having handling that could best be described as nautical and seats as spongy as a broken sofa with no side bolstering to speak of save for leaning against a door or the poor, hump sitting middle passenger, they felt wider than a school bus. Being maybe five foot ten at my tallest, in a big car like this without a power seat to push me up to where my scalp was skimming the headliner, I always felt like as though I was looking up and over the steering wheel as opposed to sitting squarely behind it and being able to see the mass expanse of hood in front of the firewall. How I never side swiped a parked car is beyond me. Maybe I did and I didn't realize it.
For decades, Detroit marketed "bigger was better" and many buyers, like my father for instance, thought big cars like this handled like dream boats. Compared to the crude contraptions they grew up with, these softly sprung cars with automatic transmissions, over boosted steering and air conditioning where modicums of modernity. And, bless my father's heart, I don't recall ever hearing him complain that whatever barge he had was "too big". Although, there were plenty of times he scraped the side of the of the garage or backed it into parked cars, trees or sign posts. He also had an embarrassing habit of rubbing the right front tire on the curb in front of our pre-war home on a oh-so-narrow south Nassau County, New York street to make sure he was parked properly.
Thing is, despite all that size, cars like this didn't have interiors that were much more spacious than smaller cars like a Granada. The size was all for show - the interiors were horribly inefficient. Sure, they were wider giving the hump sitting middle passenger more room side to side but aside from that, interior room on big cars back then was atrocious.
Let's not over the lovely color combination of our subject too. No doubt the litany of interior color options led to a customization that doesn't exist today off showroom floors but it also led to variances in assembly that compromised quality. I steel feel bad, though, for whomever had to sit on the damn hump in the back or the front. Kids today have no idea how good they've got it. By the way, how safe was it having a person sitting right up against the driver anyway?
American automobile manufacturers began to make larger cars with the advent of all steel bodies in the 1930's. However, it was after engineering innovation hit a plateau in the mid to late 1950's that things started to get really out of hand. What with most if not all of the accouterments once construed as luxury items having trickled down to even entry level makes and models and further innovation being cost prohibitive, Detroit resorted to gimmicky styling to appeal to buyers. For certain, while a 1960 Ford sedan may look nothing like Big Red here, there's really not much of a difference between the two of them "under the hood". That kind of long term engineering stagnation is seemingly unfathomable today.
As far as sheer bulk, for most of the 1960's, Ford's full size sedans were around two hundred and ten inches long and seventy six inches wide. Large, yes, but relatively maneuverable compared to the brutes that they came out with in the 1970's. That massive up sizing started with their 1969 models that while more than six inches longer than 1968 models, at least came with a bump in wheel base that had the benefit of giving rear passengers a scoshe more leg room. 1973 saw another up-sizing that, along with federally mandated "safety bumpers", helped to make Ford sedans like Big Red stretch the tape measure out to more than two hundred and twenty four inches long. That's comically huge.
Ford only made them this big between 1973 and 1978 and their timing couldn't have been worse. The OPEC embargo in October 1973 knocked the snot out of sales of big, thirsty cars and they never recovered. Couple that with the imports finally beginning to get a real toe hold at the time and its easy to see how and why road dinosaurs like Big Red became extinct.
So, what happened to Big Red? Hard to imagine someone bought this as a daily driver but you never know. Certainly would make for an interesting ride but it would be so expensive to gas up given this thing might get eleven or twelve miles per gallon. Hey, maybe some movie company scooped it up for use in a period piece they're making? That would be cool. Suffice to say, regardless of what happened to it, whatever we come up with is probably more interesting.
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